I don't want to spend my one precious life dealing with Google's AI search
aftermath.site
aftermath.site
If the only thing gen AI delivers is killing Google’s search standing, it’ll have served a useful purpose.
https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_20...
https://fortune.com/2024/01/18/why-is-google-search-so-bad-s... | https://archive.is/CLO4S
https://searchengineland.com/google-to-cut-thousands-of-sear...
(I use Kagi, DDG, and OpenAI for search primarily, all paid for, so my first hand experience with Google Search is limited, intentionally; are faster poor results better than slightly slower good results? I can spare a few seconds for better, this is not high frequency trading)
How is this in practice? Normal GPT is entirely untrustworthy for a lot of it's information. How can you trust it's "search" results/summaries?
I've said it before, but it's like watching the news about a topic you know a lot about and realizing how wrong they are... yet you continue to believe the same people regarding subjects you know nothing about. GPT feeds you BS, and you have to be knowledgeable about the subject to detect it... yet we blindly trust it's output on subjects we know little about. That's... dangerous.
It frustrates me to no end... and then I go back for more punishment naively believing this time it'll actually be right.
With that said, the newer voice interactive version (using the app), I've found to be pretty slick for debating yourself on technical merits of designs/architecture, etc.
But even if you redo the whole thing and it is efficient, it is still less than some minor performance improvement in Chrome can achieve for the world.
Speaking as a customer, it's slow, annoying, and makes the shopping experience there miserable. If you innovate in that software space, you might be able to make a significant impact on the trade of certified exotic wood and maybe even save a few species of tree.
It is driving people mad via the YouTube algorithms.
And it is destroying democracy.
All Youtube does is feed me engineering and astronomy videos. It's actually improving my life.
Your algorithm is a reflection of you.
This is objectively false. "The" algorithm is designed to maximize engagement - so you will be shown content you are most likely to watch, click, listen to the most. As it turns out, "Outrage Porn" is highly engaging...
Scroll through enough YouTube Shorts, and just like TikTok, your "algorithm" slowly but surely reduces to outrage porn. All paths lead to outrage porn. All of them...
You scroll past, then scroll back because "wtf did I just see?" - and now you're in. The frequency starts to increase and pretty soon you're shouting at clouds feeling like you're the only one that realizes how crazy everything is...
It's hard to keep your feed "clean" and dialed into just things that bring you intellectual stimulation or enjoyment. It's not impossible, but it's quit difficult. You constantly have to realign your algorithm lest it goes off into the weeds.
The confusion happens because this can be very easy. All it takes is rarely watching youtube.
If you only watch a random video here and there, Google won't push all the bullshit at all. So the people watching many videos, getting the shitty recommendations, and complaining that the internet is crazy end-up sounding insane to everybody else.
I have consumed more than my fair share of content on Youtube, Instagram, Facebook videos, and TikTok. My timeline is all engineering, spaceships, jumping puppies, and comedians (and not the negative kind).
It's an algorithm, it wants you to watch more and click on all the ads. It doesn't care if the world burns, but it also isn't going to push you that way.
My statement will only be "objectively false" if the algorithm is somehow programmed for political extremism. In reality, each of us is in the driver's seat.
People have been spouting crap since time immemorial - doesn't mean you have to watch it.
I would suggest a heavy and sustained dose of puppy videos.
Searching then watching is effectively realigning the feed to your latest and most engaged preferences.
Doom scrolling will get worse and worse as time goes on - it appears entirely unavoidable. They pick up on "positive" interaction signals such as slowing down while scrolling past a video, scrolling back to a video, letting it play more than once, even downvoting can be a sign of engagement and a catalyst for more of the same...
You are right - the algorithm doesn't care if the world burns... it just wants to maximize engagement. That, for most of the human population, means stuff that gets immediate reactions. Unfortunately that often means outrageous material.
Yes and no, you're correct in that it feeds you more of the stuff you engage with, but that's not what it should be going if YouTube cared about the mental well being of it's users. The YouTube algorithm is notorious for not responding to deliberate user input. Say I know that the content I engage with is harmful to my mental health, first step in dealing with the issue. You CANNOT tell YouTube to stop enabling you, even if you try. There are things the algorithm isn't smart enough to understand, or if YouTube is evil, understand that it SHOULD NOT respond to.
Example: I wasted a lot of time on Shorts, and videos less than 2 minutes, junk content. So I start hitting "Not interested", the algorithm WILL NOT pick up on the thing these videos have in common, that they are short. You can block channels, that works, except that there are thousands of similar channels which YouTube will then just push instead.
What I would like to see is YouTube have settings for: What kind of person do you want to be? And then just push the hell out of relevant content, ignoring any level of engagement. I think everyone knows why YouTube won't be doing that.
YouTube is a company, they do what's good for the stock price / profit margin. If it hurts the users, they don't care. It's not that they are evil, they just don't give a crap.
To give a specific example, something that honestly kind of baffles and bothers me is the amount of firearms related videos in my recommendations despite the fact that I never watch them, I don't own any firearms and I keep clicking "Don't Recommend Channel" and they never seem to go away. It has to be because the topic is tangentially related somehow to something I've watched, or maybe people who are into firearms overlap with some of the content I watch. But it's the volume and the non-responsiveness to my feedback that annoys me.
Another example: my wife and I enjoy watching the Eurovision Song Contest every year. So naturally we've watched a lot of that content in the days and weeks leading up to it. Obviously the algorithm is going to recommend content related to Eurovision, but my home page is completely flooded with these recommendations to the seeming exclusion of most other stuff that I want to watch. And I keep clicking "Don't Recommend Channel" on the various "reaction" videos that are just feeder content featuring people reacting to the songs and performances ... because I CAN'T STAND reaction videos in general and NEVER watch them. But they keep appearing in the recommendations nonetheless.
Recommendation algorithms are a hard problem to solve, for sure. I'm not trying to be unfair to YouTube because I know these recommendations are somehow related to what I do watch. I just know that it feels like 90% of those recommendations miss the mark regardless. YouTube is starting to feel like cable TV these days ("200 channels and nothing to watch") where my wife and I often find ourselves just doom scrolling and refreshing the home page (we watch on our TV) hoping that something we're interested in watching at that moment will appear. Often times nothing does and we go do something else.
I don't watch news on YouTube, ever. If I see a video from a news outlet I automatically click "Don't Recommend Channel." And I've done that with all of the big major news channels like CNN, Fox News, MSNBC etc. But that doesn't stop videos from local affiliates showing up in a never ending game of whack-a-mole.
To be fair these do not tend to "flood" my recommendations. But I want them to go away all together and I can't seem to make that happen.
The fact that it has been reported by groups like Amnesty International that Facebook helped to enable the ethnic violence in Myanmar makes arguing this sort of point much easier. People want to treat complaints about attention economy companies like they are coming from whiners who just don’t like ad profiles. It is useful to have specific information to remind people of the actual stakes of uncontrolled, personalized propaganda and social manipulation that these companies can enable.
So if you have one for Google I’d definitely be interested in adding it to my collection. (I’ll admit some bias, I think they are a little better than Facebook, but that bar is so low, let’s be careful not to trip over it).
The best arguments for Google's algorithms making people crazy for lay people would be Aaron Swartz like individuals who just go unknown.
I can think of atleast 4 individuals new to me the last 6mo ive discovered who used to cover court cases, ran NGOs, or worked as journalists that have been seemingly swept up in what looks like delusions.
Lots of typos, egegious oversights, etc#. Its hard to personify these individuals as theyre hard to reach and anyone w ptsd or whom knows people w ptsd know how hard it is to provide support to someone locked in a fight-or-flight reflex. After a terror/fear/paranoia becomes familiar anything else feels foreign. Human connection becomes scary.
Read up on bateson-esque schizomogenisis and reflect on the CIAs relation with the "unabomber".
Many of the comments here exaggerating the evil of the algo and claiming that it ruins people's minds unless they're "shown better" reek of elitism and an implicit desire to control other's belief/feedback choices for their own good. Aside from this being a morally weak viewpoint, it's also bullshit in a practical sense. The majority of such people with an intellectual superiority complex are little better at avoiding intellectual bias than the average person, they just sometimes learn to disguise it with more sophisticated looking justifications.
Companies are not democracies. If every single dev thinks that the user experience matters, but the CEO wants more ads, you will get more ads. It's literally a tyranny.
Or, as I like to say, Google hired some of the best, and promoted all of the worst…and after 25 years here we are.
Where does Google's ad revenue come from if users give up on waiting for their searches to complete before they're ever shown any revenue-generating sponsored links?
Actually, thinking about this more, I fundamentally don't understand Google's search experience strategy over the last 10 years. Even before AI answers, they were heuristic-ing answers into a little box that pushed sponsored ad placements below the fold. Why push sponsored results below the fold? How does Google make money from a search engine that just answers people's questions directly, rather than doing lead-gen for the rest of the Internet (with much of the Internet willing to pay for that)?
They've just done a rather braindead job of it, with the experience of these loss-leader queries feeling perceptually† worse than a regular SERP page would.
It's like a grocery store running a sale on e.g. milk, selling it for below-cost — but then making you have to wait in a line for five minutes in front of the milk cooler to get it. It feels like so much friction that not only wouldn't lure people in; it would push people to avoid that grocer when its milk sales are happening, and shop at other stores instead!
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† I emphasize perceptually here. Even if the total time spent waiting for an AI answer is shorter than the time it would take to load a SERP page, read and select a link that looks like it'll have your answer, click it, load the resulting page, and read it — the AI experience could still feel longer, in large part because "the ball is in your court" for a lot of the self-navigated query, with you being given things to look at and click on; while "the ball is in their court" for the entirety of the AI response, with just a spinner and no indication of what's happening.
As such, I wonder if this could be solved by just running a cute little animation under the AI prompt window: make it look like it's automating the loading of a [blurred to non-identifiability] SERP page, scrolling down, clicking a result, loading an [again blurred] page, highlighting a few random fragments of it, and then transposing them together to form the paragraphs of the answer — before the answer actually snaps into place on top of that animation. If you can predict how long before the AI answers, you can even use that to determine how long the animation should spend dicking around on the pretend SERP page and answer page.
You serve the ads while the answers spin up.
This is actually a problem I currently have with Ecosia on mobile. I search, get the result, and then the ads pop in, pushing the search results down, causing me to click the ad and not the result that previously occupied that part of the screen.
All human eyeball traffic goes through Google.
It is in their interest to keep destroying the open information marketplace because then advertisers are forced to buy through Google. (Much easier and more profitable than trying to make a good adtech product.)
As others in this thread already point out, it's extremely easy to use DDG or Bing if you want.
As an illusion sure, in practice not really.
I use Kagi, I bought the family plan so I could try convining my family to use it, did they? No.
Did my family want to use Signal for messaging? No.
Do my friends want to use something else than Discord for communicating with me? No.
Competition exists and in plenty but folk are too mind sucked to want to move platform. If its not broke, why change?
People don't want to change. And until such platforms close their gates or whereby something new comes along that isn't a clone; there will be no shift.
If switching cost > perceived benefit why should we expect anything other than status quo? When a truly innovative platform that offers benefit > switching cost, users will naturally flock to it. We're already starting to see that with ChatGPT.
No. Network effects mean that there's not only a high cost of switching away from the largest network, but there's a high cost to use anything other than the largest network. When that bias exists, you cannot infer any preferences from market outcomes.
benefit > switching cost + network cost
This has repeatedly been demonstrated as large networks have been disrupted. Folks switched away from MSN Messenger and MySpace didn't they?
You won’t find me on any social media other than Linkedin and Twitter. And on those, I no longer post or interact with people. I keep Twitter because of announcements and Linkedin as a public CV. I also use WhatsApp because alternatives are not really viable (but I reduced its social aspect as much as possible). You’re free to make your choices. Just don’t complain about it, if you won’t heed my advices.
Google is testing on those as we test on animals. ML for only search? Naw.
If everyone turned off their droid, stopped using their email, switched to Firefox, they would still be on top.
Yes. It's better not to, and if your going to preach, yeah. As I use no services other than Signal but we are still just pawns in this game.
We are a just pittance of income of those who are keeping the empire's on top. And who do you run too? DDG is owned by Apple so your only fuelling their empire.
This goes deeper than you could imagine.
All human eyeballs go through Google's advertising network first. (Unless you're an Apple-only person.)
So for advertisers it makes no sense to budget anything but Google first and foremost. Maybe they'll add some Bing-Yahoo if they have spare money laying around and want to catch the remaining couple percent of the audience.
P.S. Search is only a small part of Google's advertising network, and not the most important one nowadays.
It did what it needed to do to realise the same thing and get their fingers in all the other pies.
https://english.almayadeen.net/articles/blog/genocide-in-the...
https://texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/images/...
Google is in a hard place - they need to roll the feature out to stay relevant to early adopters of AI. But they can't give good results without making it a huge loss leader - their revenue comes from sending users to spam. They can't seriously commit to a loss leader that counters their entire business model, so they're going to half ass it. That stands to upset established users and early adopters alike, with an unfocused and executive sabotaged Hail Mary.
I call this the "decline of AOL" phase of Google's lifecycle. There's a big crisis about the value and necessity of the service, but rather than innovating, execs can only push annoying ads and gimmicks.
Not to mention improvements to TCP itself (BBR congestion control).
This is really sad. Seems like a product team throwing many tens of millions of dollars worth of performance research out the window.
Why pretend theyre doing anything but making ads more than anything else
What is the reason for the page latency. Is it TCP. No. It is pages laden with excessive amounts of advertising. Google is an advertising company. The problem is the advertising, which causes latency, not TCP.
Moreover, they did not "invent" this TCP replacement, they borrowed the idea from djb (CurveCP) who may have borrowed it from someone else. CurveCP does better as it encrypts each packet individually, does not require TLS and allows multiple websites to be hosted on the same IP address. No plaintext domainnames on the wire (SNI) required. Nor some elaborate, complex and cumbersome Band-aid like ECH.
Google's problem is how to deliver more advertising without affecting www speed, i.e., without web users noticing how much advertising slows the web down. But Google spins this problem as how to "make the web faster". It is Google's business, online advertising, that is slowing the web down. Google deliberately adds latency to pages when "loading" so that ad auctions can take place first. Advertising is the priority, not reducing latency.
Don't complain about a company having a monopoly while using their products WHEN THERE ARE COMPLETELY FREE AND VIABLE ALTERNATIVES.
One reason I'm unwilling to move from Firefox right now: Recommended Extensions.
They're extensions that are checked by Mozilla employees for quality, security and privacy. Extensions have such unfettered access to my browsing, and so many have such nefarious practices that I'll only install extensions that Mozilla vets.
However the security argument was used to inhibit ad blockers and get more control about browsers, an already quite restricted ecology. I gladly have the option to vet addons myself just like I do vet browser vendors. Some of the later and attached companies might have questionable goals.
For me this feature of Firefox is the least important, but demands differ I guess.
This is 100% on the consumers, over and over open source projects receive no funding and exist by virtue of big companies subsidizing them because nobody is willing to pay for their principles.
If Firefox can't survive without Google, then at least they won't be able to beard for Google's monopoly.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai on Tuesday confirmed that Google pays Apple 36% of Safari search revenue, under the terms of a default search agreement that is core to the Justice Department’s antitrust claims.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/14/google-pays-apple-36percent-...
Second, ff comes with Google as its default search - so that's going to suck.
I will be happy for you to yell at me to use Firefox when you have fired Mozilla's execs, and dropped Pocket and the Google default search. Until then, I feel like you're not facing reality about what ff has become due to it's cooperation with Google.
I'm confident that if you can post on HN you can figure out how to change a default setting
Here's the deal. My elderly mom and dad are being eaten alive by software that takes advantage of their ignorance, and that needs to change. Mozilla's part of that, and they need to change.
Google pays for the default setting because it matters
Yes, it's so non-technical users will get stuck with Google
But that's a problem for those users
What's the problem?
It's inaccessibility caused by corporate corruption. Innocent users get stuck with a increasingly bad search, for a few million bucks a year.
Old people are very dear to me, and seeing them get taken advantage of on every digital platform is breaking my heart.
I have to fight, for the sake of my parents and other old folks, if for no other reason. Perhaps you feel me, perhaps you don't.
Thanks for your comment, it made me think of why I care about this.
Hope you have a nice day, and think of your own old peeps, and get to give them some love!
i tried to lure my parents towards the Matrix protocol but apparently having a connection error each other month is unacceptable... we returned to the well working Whatsapp! i wonder what would be their opinions if i took their Android devices and substituted all their apps for FOSS alternatives & an un-googled Lineage
but yeah, i think fighthing for what's right, specially when you can; is important... but the vast majority will just use what's the most convenient & shutdown all the doors with rude comments, despite if the are about freedom
And I can also dog Mozilla for accepting the money.
And I can also dog anyone who thinks they did nothing wrong.
Are you in the final category? Want to debate about it? I invite you to make an opening position statement.
Exactly how many dollars is OP paying google to complain about 3 second delay times?
What's his premium support plan and how does that pay employees to handle his banalities?
Having a convoluted pricing scheme shouldn’t make a company immune to criticism.
They're also planning shopping ads. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1858644 https://old.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/18du4qs/firefox_a...
You can make it leave. Firefox isn’t dead; browser choice still exists.
Yet. That's to say that Firefox feels as it's currently on life support; alas one thanks to Google.
All it would take is for Google to remove funding and the browser sinks, Mozilla with it too.
Without Firefox, Alphabet would be liable to an anti-trust lawsuit. Apple not so, because they keep it to their iDevice.
- Firefox is Mozilla's and Mozilla is a non-profitable organisation.
The story as I know it is that in the early days Mozilla became the defacto internet suite as they produced a suite of applications. Email, FTP client and a browser and these were crafted and sustained by volunteers. (This is skipping the predecessor, Netscape).
The internet was simple then. HTML and CSS with an lil' bit of Javascript made the internet fine.
Everything was open and the rainbow coloured fence of your neighbour was pretty. You could even implement your own renderer and know it would work.
In the dozens: https://eylenburg.github.io/browser_engines.htm
Introducing Google: they started out just as search engine and that it was. Pretty great at it what it was and their was no other. It's boasted feature was one of that you could rank pages with PageRank although in the long run became unprofitable.
The popped dotCom boom had made VC's scared to invest and Silicon Valley was still recovering from the aftermath.
Unlike Yahoo, Lycos and other service providers, who all had offered services like email and entertainment subscriptions, survived.
Google, as bankruptcy neared had offered to sell to Yahoo for $500k and what a different world we would be in. But this didn't happen.
Google then started their up-taking. By introducing advertising to their search engines.
The gimmick I recall is "buying nukes" as if you searched "nukes" you'd get a banner in the right hand side of the page of "buy nukes on ebay". Geeky college humour.
Eventually, they branched out releasing gMail with beta invites and insanely large inbox sizes where the latter only gave you small amounts of 20mb.
And folk flocked to this service. You didn't need 1gb of email storage but hey, you had it. They had it all, a feature rich simple email client. Simple being the key, Simple search engine and your simple website now possible to be seen. As well as vendor lock in. As to change email is as painful to change mobile phone numbers. Dark-UI.
You had a exclusive gmail email, a chance to be on top of Googles search and it thrived. The internet existed but wasn't something for everyday everyone but heck was it a good time.
Introducing Apple and the iPhone. This was the new strike to the internet. The internet wasn't an everyone thing but it was now. Apple created the iPhone from the previous based Java firmware driven non-smart phones with apps and Google introduces with Android a few years later with their apps.
Apple users already being an exclusive clique of the time flocked in masses and this boosted Apple sky high. Eventually major vendors started to suck up to Google as Apple as we know doesn't play ball with the BlackBerry being the business phone, tried! in the end lost as it wasn't innovative enough nor was designed for the consumer market.
We now had this fantasy tech but no future internet for it to work.
And so Google crafted the next-gen specifications for HTML. HTML5 for the internet - This was to enable the "future" and Chrome came with it to carry out these new features.
For their phone and for the desktop web browser prior to that you had Internet Explorer or Firefox. Even then Firefox was least popular because Internet Explorer was shipped in Windows and sabotaged.
This was a further blow for Mozilla because now as an volunteer organisation with less money now had to implement all these new features while Google already had their thing. This kept Firefox lagging behind and made FireFox less popular as the new rebranded Internet wouldn't work with it.
Google with that and advertising money as well as resources could afford to keep implementing, sabotaging and make it painful expiration for anyone to keep up the pace.
While this is excluding Mozillas mishandling and not greatest decisions but here we are now, Google dictating the latest internet splash of paint.
The younger crowds who adopted Google, adopted Chrome as the browser and the legacy keeps going.
Googles vendor lock in for gmail as the same with Canonical's Ubuntu, (which helped Firefox a bit) with its free-cd campaign, and so boosted Linux but ultimately with less money and community support has brought Mozilla to it's knees.
No it doesn't?
-- Sent from Mozilla Firefox
If they didn't they'd be vulnerable to an very large anti-trust lawsuit.
We don't want all the other browsers dying, then google requiring you to use chrome to view youtube, google, gmail, etc.
It's one thing if you know you are using an LLM tool, but when using a search engine, people won't expect this.
Honestly, I would not be surprised if they didn't think it was. But thanks their "Code Red" they seem determined to get as much out the door as possible to avoid someone else doing it first.
> I don't think you can reasonable expect all users to realize it is low quality nonsense, when it is presented at the top of the results.
And that is the problem, we are training a large number of non technical people that these tools are supposedly reliable. When the problems with them confidently giving very wrong results are well understood. But we just don't talk about it anymore outside of certain circles.
If we did keep talking about it, all the AI hype would die off or at least he seriously hampered.
This is why you can ask it a simple physics question for example, and the default might be to give a wrong answer based on a popular misconception. But tell it that it should answer as Richard Feynman, and it can give the correct answer. It "knows" that the first answer was incorrect, but it's still a more appropriate/likely answer given the default scenario, where it effectively assumes it is supposed to act as a random internet stranger when it answers.
Google slides doesn't have a morph transition (PowerPoint does), but the AI will confidently claim it does: https://www.google.com/search?q=google+slides+morph+transiti...
Over the past year, I've fallen in love with my bookmarks again. They're curated. They take me right to the answer I want. You can set the "omnibar" up to search your bookmarks. They don't hallucinate themselves into existence.
So, thanks Google, I've gone back to 1999, for the total failure that your service is.
The UI of bookmarks needs to be updated so it's more than just a favicon and page title. Google shows previews of the page content in its links, so it's easier to know if the link is the page you're looking for.
Did you know the diameter of the sun is only 1.4 kilometers?
I'm a 99% Firefox user.
At the bottom of that tab is the "Search shortcuts", which makes it trivially easy to have multiple search engines installed and use the one you want from your search bar. (I use @g for google, @d for DDG, and @k for Kagi, with an @v for DevDocs.io)
There's a term for this; it's called "layout shift". And guess which giant search engine company actually punishes websites which include layout shift? You're damn right, it's Google:
* https://developers.google.com/publisher-tag/guides/minimize-...
* https://web.dev/articles/cls
These big companies supposedly only hire world-class developers; the cream of the crop. And yet they can't even get the basics right. Stuff that I would have avoided in my first Geocities site when I was a kid.
Stupid hypocritical twats.
Just scroll down? Is it that hard?
It would do Google good to publish an AI integration philosophy to address critical issues related to AI in search. Such a document would allow for public scrutiny, which is crucial when your user base is a few billion strong and you are as influential player in the field. It would also serve as a good platform for other companies to study. Kagi has an AI integration philosophy [1], which, while modest, has successfully navigated us through the current AI cycle and I think helped our users understand what they can expect from us.
AI can enhance the search experience, but the core search functionality must be strong and robust first. An LLM grounded in search will only be as good as the search results it gets.
Google's "all-in" rollout of AI into search without first addressing these foundational principles and improving the core search experience is interesting - does it really mean they are betting the house on AI? The more I see things like this from Google and others, the more I want to go back to basics and just continue improving the core search quality.
[0]: see sibling comment
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hide-google-ai-over...
> google.com##.GcKpu
The upside being you don't have to rewrite it every time the sites layout is updated with new random IDs, only when the AI Overview heading itself changes wording or style.
Useful trick with Google for common searches: add
-"best"
Bing, unfortunately, does not have "-" exclusion.
[1] https://twitter.com/di_friscoSEO/status/1790824143752954101/...
https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1790473952256786805
This is what happens when you blindly worship at the altar of Progress.
Then again, Google is so dominant that many folks won't quickly bounce to an alternative...
Google controls 90% of search and that's where most consumers start their journey
The current state of the union with Google for businesses, especially small business / local business, is a disaster
- Bidding on your own keyword, to prevent competitors from showing up as #1 - currently consumes 15 - 25% of total paid budget across a number of businesses we own. It's literally just a 1@%!@% tax.
- Google constantly rolls out tests in the name of "quality" - recently for local businesses "hours of operation" became a search signal. Pragmatic enough right? But instantly the spammers started doing 24/7 hours with fake phone numbers etc registered. The road to hell is paved with good intentions they say, this is a constant theme with Google where they come up with some great idea, and then can't figure out how to defend vs the spammers creating massive headaches, costs, etc.
- Google continually takes away visibility and contrl. EG their new AI budget manager takes further visibility away. Right now it drives a little efficiency. But when everybody has it? It will optimize SMB (and everybody else) to the fracture line.
And NOW we are going to spend our precious life trying to figure out how the !%!@ to engage with an LLM (that Google doesnt' even understand)?
I just want to give up.
Honestly it's no wonder that private equity is gobbling up everything from dental practices, to plumbers, to HOUSING
It's become such a crazy sophisticated game that nobody else can play and survive
I remember see Google launching features off by default with some nagging to turning on, but this is so greedy and dictated by the race on AI, every company want to have AI on their branding like the popular girls on Mean Girls want to be in that group.
I also encourage to switch to Firefox, but in this case to escape this feature is changing the default search engine on your browser, which I recommend Kagi (paid without ads) or Duck Duck Go (free with ads).
Its ironic that this new feature may drive people off of chrome..
Overall im hoping OpenAI and Microsoft create a chatGPT phone to compete with iPhone and Android. Either they go the Android route (create a phone OS for manufacturers) or build a direct iPhone competitor. The UI/UX would be fairly minimal and ur chatGPT phone would be used as your 2nd brain / your AI friend. You wouldn't interact with the web so much .. maybe you still would with apps but not as much as your home screen 50% of the time would provide textually, graphically or audibly what you seek with minimal effort on your part. Your AI friend knows you well....
That's what we need, a brain/"friend" that collects and analyzes every single thing we think/ask about to use against us later and/or sell to third parties. No thank you!
The only AI "friend" you'll ever have will be run locally entirely on your own hardware and will never send/share/leak any part of your interactions with anyone else for any reason.
You might say that's crazy, but that's just Overton. It's the expectation we have of librarians (and that they have of themselves.) It took PATRIOT to erode that norm (and many others.)
Right now, that at the least means running it locally, although that's not going to be sufficient.
They don't work for you, they work for the vendor. You can't hold an AI accountable, so you shouldn't trust it with your secrets.
Unfortunately the version of capitalism we ended up with ensures that corps won't build anything like this lest it kill off opportunities for "services revenue".
Google's hand is forced by OpenAI-related news and investor pressure.
LLMs, on the other hand, are incredibly useful in their other products where we have to write text. I find myself relying heavily on Gemini to improve my grammar, emails, social media posts, and whatnot. This post too is spellchecked by Gemini.
When google first launched, it was visibly much better at finding results.
Yes.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/14/24074314/google-now-offer...
Google's AI search, so far, is pretty far down on the list, at least for me.
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40011314
Whip up a SearXNG instance or use one instead.
But I still find Kagi more refreshing than Google.
Kagi just works well and I really love the way that you can prioritize the sites you like and block the sites that you don’t in the search and that there aren’t any ads and I’ve used a lot of other search engines and this is the only one I’ve like well enough that I actually enjoy using it and don’t find myself subconciously back at google.
Where? The article drips with annoyance, not fear, at 3 second searches that no longer have the results that were previously returned in fractions of a second.
>There's no nuance to it.
Why does there need to be? Author is annoyed. Author explained annoyance. The end.
>I'm starting to feel personally attacked by people like this
That is a very strong indicator that you should divest yourself from the topic for awhile. The author does not attack you in any way.
> That is a very strong indicator that you should divest yourself from the topic for awhile. The author does not attack you in any way.
Before some stray AI evangelist leaps into the comments to promise the tech will get better, I want to be clear that even if it were instantaneous, I still wouldn’t want it. I didn’t ask for results from the plagiarism machine!
That doesn't sound like annoyance to me. It sounds like hate.
Three days ago from my comment history:
-4 points by labrador
Maybe AI will speed up the development process
afavour
Maybe AI will replace eyes
labrador
I'm not going to stop talking about AI just because some hate it
afavour
And I won't stop mocking AI hype just because some believe it
So you see, I'm starting to take it personally
I suppose it’s an interesting psychological example.